Trackmania Turbo is broken up into 4 different environments: Canyon, Valley, Lagoon and Stadium. Each environment offers up it’s own unique atmosphere and track designs. I can safely say I love the environments for Canyon, Valley and Lagoon. Canyon has you racing through areas that remind me of the Grand Canyon. Valley has you racing through forested areas that feel like they belongTrackmania Turbo is broken up into 4 different environments: Canyon, Valley, Lagoon and Stadium. Each environment offers up it’s own unique atmosphere and track designs. I can safely say I love the environments for Canyon, Valley and Lagoon. Canyon has you racing through areas that remind me of the Grand Canyon. Valley has you racing through forested areas that feel like they belong somewhere in the European country side, and Lagoon has you hurtling through rollercoaster style tracks with a tropical beach backdrop. The Stadium tracks aren’t bad, but the environment just felt a bit too sterile for my liking.
The individual tracks themselves offer up an incredibly surreal racing environment. The goal is to simply race from the starting line to finish line as quickly as possible. This is easier said than done for a lot of the tracks in this game and it won’t be long before Trackmania Turbo’s difficulty rears it’s ugly, rage-inducing head. There will be corners that need to be hit at the optimal driving line, drifting around them at just the right angle in order to maintain your speed. There will be walls that offer up what feels like an almost 90 degree banking as you try and not slide off by going to slow or fly off the edge with too much speed. There will be rollercoaster style loops and corkscrews that are disorienting and difficult to navigate and there will be massive jumps that will need to be hit with the right amount of speed for a smooth landing instead of taking an awkward bounce off the road. While all these challenges culminate into quite the spectacle, I found myself either crashing into walls or barriers, flying off the track trying to drift around a narrow corner or crashing and loosing speed on a rollercoaster loop and falling into the abyss. Each track has checkpoints that scattered throughout the race and you can revert to the last checkpoint by pressing the “Y” button. While this sounds like an anti-frustration mechanic in theory, in practice, I found this feature to be almost useless. Firstly, most the tracks are all fairly short. Some of the early tracks can be finished in around 15 seconds, some of the longer ones take about 30-40 seconds. There are a hand full of circuit races that take a bit longer and perhaps this is where that checkpoint system has value. Aside from that, you’re better off hitting the “B” button to restart the race. Second of all, restarting at last checkpoint doesn’t reset the timer to what it was when you hit that checkpoint, the clock keeps running. Do that enough times and you won’t register a fast enough time to progress to the next series of tracks. It may not always be ideal, but I found the more expedient method was to just restart the race. To that point, if you need to restart or load your last checkpoint, there is no load time. The game will immediately drop you back to where you’re suppose to be. No need to stare a loading screen, stewing in your own rage.
Trackmania Turbo features 200 tracks that all need to be unlocked in the game’s campaign mode. Each of the four environment’s tracks are broken up into White, Green, Blue, Red and Black series. The “White” maps are generally the easiest, the Blue and Red maps offer up a more healthy challenge and the Black tracks are absolutely merciless. The game rates you on a Bronze, Silver, Gold or a green Trackmaster medal (meaning you beat the track developer’s time) depending on how fast you make your way through the race. You’ll need at least a Silver medal on each track in a series in order to progress in the game. Naturally, this becomes harder to pull off once you start getting into the Blue and Red tracks. I personally capped my play through of this game at the Red Canyon series, since my budget for Xbox controllers can only be so much before it starts eating into other expenses in my life. There’s going to be a fair amount of trial-and-error to a lot of the tracks, to the point where hitting the “B” button to restart the race was almost instinctual for me if I hit a wall or took a corner in a **** way.
Like most arcade racers these days, you might expect some customization tools for your cars. Aside from it’s paint job and decals you can’t customize your car in any meaningful way.
Performance wise, this game is great, even on Vanilla Xbox One. It maintains a steady frame rate with no stuttering or lagging. I didn’t experience any crashes-to-dashboard, texture pop-in or streaming. Having no in game loads screens when restarting or reverting to last checkpoint is a godsend, all things considered.
Overall, Trackmania Turbo is a fun, challenging, surreal arcade racer that offers up decent replay value and longevity. It’s tough to recommend this game to casual arcade racing fans due to the game’s difficulty. But for any arcade racers that are up for a decent, rewarding challenge, than Trackmania Turbo is a great game for you.… Expand
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